Commando to be remade!

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(via Deadline, Totalfilm, Empire Online, Slashfilm & Filmshaft)


That sound you hear is someone tooling up with serious weaponry and ammo – slotting knives into sheathes and strapping guns into holsters.

No, it’s not Arnie; it’s several die-hard fans who love Commando and are duly horrified to learn that 20th Century Fox is planning to remake the ‘80s action-fest.

Following hot on the tail of Robert Rodriguez’s new Predators movie, the bright sparks over at Fox have announced the latest ‘80s classic to get a bit of spit and polish will be Arnie action-fest Commando.

Harsh Times helmer David Ayer will be writing the script and pointing the camera, whilst Erwin Stoff and John Davis will produce.

Details are fairly minimal at the moment, but according to Deadline, Ayer’s vision will attempt to rein in the rippling muscles and OTT action, in favour of a “real-world spin”.

In the original, Schwarzenneger played John Matrix, a retired special-forces hard-case who is forced into assisting a military coup when his daughter is kidnapped by a power-hungry warlord.

Naturally, Arnie reacted by shooting everybody, so will this “real-world” approach have Ayer’s leading man playing things differently? The word is this Matrix will be more of a covert operator, a la Jason Bourne, so expect any chewy one-liners to be kept to a minimum. Ayer’s script (and the film he plans to direct) will apparently revolve around a stealthier approach to a similar problem.

Let’s hope it’s half as much fun.

We could either end up with a balls-out, explosion-happy retread of the original, which would be fun but pointless, or a poe-faced attempt to “modernise” things by crowbarring in 9/11-references and cutting all the excess that was so ace the first time around.

Here’s the thing about Commando: it is utterly ridiculous. Arguably a terrible film from many angles, it manages to be totally earnest and wildly silly at the same time. That is, it’s campy as all hell. The mixture of way over the top action and attempts at deadpan humor is fun, pure and simple.

With Schwarzenegger working towards the height of his one-liner delivery, there’s nothing else quite like it. There are a lot of films that want to be just like it, but there’s only one Commando.

How do you replicate that?

At what point does this more realistic version just become Taken?

And most important: who will be the new Rae Dawn Chong?

Who knows — maybe Ayer really has killer ideas. He’s got the military background, and his directorial efforts (Street Kings and Harsh Times) weren’t great, but showed enough promise that maybe he’s got something up his sleeve. Then again, this is the guy that was going to push forward a remake of The Wild Bunch, and that’s pretty hard to stomach.

Ayer’s got a decent enough track record however, so hopefully he can make it work without upsetting too many people.

[newb]

wtf


why

just make your fucking movie and call it something else for christ sakes

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In the past month, we learned that producer John Davis is planning a remake of the 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Commando.

Assigned to the script was David Ayer, who has writing credits on The Fast and the Furious and Training Day and also directed Harsh Times and Street Kings.

Now, it seems that Ayer has produced a finished script for Commando and is pursuing the opportunity to direct.

Collider recently interviewed Davis and asked about the progress of the project:

We have a really great script. You know, I don’t know if it really makes sense to call it Commando. Maybe it does or maybe doesn’t. It is the reboot of it and all of that stuff. It is David Ayer, who did Training Day. He wrote it and wants to direct it. It is there and it is a brilliant script. It is just waiting for the right moment for the studio to want to make it and finding the right actor.

Davis also indicated that the movie would be especially violent, saying that the script is written with a "hard R" rating in mind.